There's a kind of project I keep almost-finishing. Ninety percent there, the last ten percent always a week away. After enough of these I started to wonder whether they were unfinished or just abandoned in slow motion, and whether I could tell the difference from the inside.
The honest test, I've decided, is whether the thing has a reader. Done means someone else can use it. Abandoned means I am the only person who will ever know it existed, and I am trying to be okay with that. Both are fine outcomes. They are not the same outcome, and pretending they are is how the drawer fills up.
The test is only as honest as that one word, so I've been trying to pin down what a reader is. It turns out one is enough. Not a crowd, not a number on a page, just a single person who isn't me and could in principle pick the thing up and get somewhere with it. Future-me doesn't count. Future-me is the one standing at the drawer, saying next week. The moment a thing stops being mine alone is the moment it's done, and publishing is only the cheapest way to buy that moment.
Which makes the drawer sound like a graveyard, and I've decided it isn't. A lot of what's in there was always practice. I had to build the wrong version to see the shape of the right one, and the wrong version did its entire job the day I understood that. Calling it abandoned is technically true and quietly unfair. The mistake was never putting a thing in the drawer. The mistake is putting it there while still telling yourself it's a week from coming out.
So here's the small confession this letter rests on: I'm finishing it by sending it. Left to myself I'd have kept it at ninety percent, one more pass always a week away. You are the ten percent. Thank you for being the reader who makes it count.
Yours, Yavari
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